Read Online Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale - Free Book Online

liked to work. Floorboards, chair and table were lurid and lumpy with splashed or trodden-in paint. The not quite empty potty nestled against the kettle and an open packet of chocolate digestives. The lines had repeatedly blurred between what was for food, for artistic or personal use. A spoon brought up there for the eating of a yoghurt had lingered, unwashed, and been used to stir paint. The mouldy yoghurt pot now held a toothbrush clogged with dried-up Marvin medium. A comb, still carrying a few of his mother’s hairs, had been used to spread one acrylic colour in furrows across another then been left to dry and serve whichever medium called it next – hair, paint or lifting out a teabag from scalding tea. She sat or crouched to work. When she sat it was in an old kitchen chair but there was an armchair too for occasional sprawling in, which she kept below the windows, facing her easel not the view. Two big pebbles lay on the armchair at the moment and two more on the floor behind it. There was a mark in the tongue-and-groove panelling where one had been hurled so it was not hard to deduce how the window above had been shattered.
    He was moved to see she had been looking at an unfinished piece of her earlier work he had never seen, a big,near-perfect circle in a dazzling blue against which she had been experimenting with shades of grey when the work was abandoned. He wondered when she had done the piece. Certainly before Petroc. Since Petroc there had been nothing like this, nothing so energetically abstract.
    He reached, shivering, behind the easel for a piece of hardboard that would cover the hole in the window. Sifting through the tangle of string, corks, picture wire and old felt tips in a Mint Choc Chip ice-cream carton from his boyhood, he found gaffer tape and scissors and set about making a temporary repair to keep the wind and rain out.
    They were lucky with the weather. It was cold but sunny and dry. It was surprise enough that Rachel had bothered to make a will, more surprising yet that she had gone to such trouble to spell out how she wished them to dispose of her.
    To the consternation of the undertakers she had insisted on a simple, biodegradable coffin made of recycled cardboard.
    Lizzy was enthusiastic about this but Garfield could only worry about it turning prematurely pulpy in bad weather. Lizzy said she had once been to a funeral where the cardboard coffin had been lovingly painted and doodled on by the family the night before. Sure enough there was a second pained phone call from the undertakers to say the cardboard coffin looked well enough and was quite sturdy but that the instructions that came with it suggested asking the bereaved if they wished to decorate its plain surfaces to add a personal touch.
    ‘You don’t want to decorate it, do you, sir?’
    ‘Erm. No,’ Garfield said, alarmed. ‘Certainly not.’ And he took a unilateral decision not to offer the choice to the others.
    Now that the coffin was being borne into the Friends’ Meeting House however, he felt it looked woefully unadorned. Not even the Autumn Sheaf (assorted asters, maple leaves, some decorative seed heads) stopped the coffin looking like an outsized shoebox.
    She never gave the environment a second thought. The only reason she had chosen this option was to have them express themselves all over her coffin. He was ashamed of his inhibitions and having connived with the undertaker’s conservatism. Now what should have been grounds for exuberance merely looked like loveless economy.
    Hedley could paint, of course, but he hated to fall short of perfection so took few risks. If Morwenna were there she would have understood exactly what was expected. She would have thrown a coffin-painting wake and had everyone leave their mark, however colourful or rude. She would have brought out glue and sequins and pots of coloured spangly dust. In the Hollywood version of this funeral he would find the courage to raid the box of crayons